The intellectual motives that have typically guided such...

The intellectual motives that have typically guided such comparative projects can be classified into three distinct categories. The first seeks to discover or locate influences; the order of influence, or other consequential exchanges such as the borrowings or adoptions of ideas between the two legal systems. Underlying the exploration of influences, however, are often aspirations to claim originality or to demonstrate how later ideas and praxis were derived from earlier sources.

Such a comparative approach, even when undertaken bona fide , is not free of suspicion concerning its objectivity, viz, that it serves agendas that celebrate the originality and thus the superiority of the source over its descendants.

In the case of Islamic studies, such a conception has often been adopted by those who view of the formative period of Islam as best understood by reference to Jewish, Christian and other environmental influences upon the and his believers.[^4] Such a conception is explicitly evident in the work that is considered the cornerstone of modern Oriental scholarship – A. Geiger’s (1810-1874) Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen?

This pioneering study, and many others like it, illustrates the prevalence of the vocabulary of ‘influence’ and ‘borrowing’ in supporting political and ideological efforts to reinvent the image of Jews and their civic conditions in modern Europe.[^5] However, tracing the influences of the Jewish legal tradition on the Islamic one is not always asymmetrical.

Alongside the efforts to situate Islam as a daughter-religion[^6] against the Judeo-Christian backdrop, many studies concerning early medieval Rabbinic literature are motivated by a desire to demonstrate the considerable impact of Islamic law and legal thinking on Jewish legal literature, either Rabbinic or Karaite, of that period.[^7] Generally speaking, the ideological motives for exploring influences and for seeking original sources were obviously related to the 19th century philological zeitgeist, the diachronic focus on historical developments and the endeavor to reconstruct the ‘original’, either the text or the author’s intention.[^8] A second motive is related to the nostalgic image of the scholastic environment in which Jewish thinkers and jurists jointly collaborated with their Islamic counterparts.